Displaying 1 - 7 of 7
-
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2019). Mutual attraction between high-frequency verbs and clause types with finite verbs in early positions: Corpus evidence from spoken English, Dutch, and German. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(9), 1140-1151. doi:10.1080/23273798.2019.1642498.
Abstract
We report a hitherto unknown statistical relationship between the corpus frequency of finite verbs and their fixed linear positions (early vs. late) in finite clauses of English, Dutch, and German. Compared to the overall frequency distribution of verb lemmas in the corpora, high-frequency finite verbs are overused in main clauses, at the expense of nonfinite verbs. This finite versus nonfinite split of high-frequency verbs is basically absent from subordinate clauses. Furthermore, this “main-clause bias” (MCB) of high-frequency verbs is more prominent in German and Dutch (SOV languages) than in English (an SVO language). We attribute the MCB and its varying effect sizes to faster accessibility of high-frequency finite verbs, which (1) increases the probability for these verbs to land in clauses mandating early verb placement, and (2) boosts the activation of clause plans that assign verbs to early linear positions (in casu: clauses with SVO as opposed to SOV order).Additional information
plcp_a_1642498_sm1530.pdf -
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2003). A corpus study into word order variation in German subordinate clauses: Animacy affects linearization independently of function assignment. In Proceedings of AMLaP 2003 (pp. 153-154). Glasgow: Glasgow University.
-
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2003). Dutch and German verb clusters in performance grammar. In P. A. Seuren, & G. Kempen (
Eds. ), Verb constructions in German and Dutch (pp. 185-221). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2003). An artificial opposition between grammaticality and frequency: Comment on Bornkessel, Schlesewsky & Friederici (2002). Cognition, 90(2), 205-210 [Rectification on p. 215]. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00145-8.
Abstract
In a recent Cognition paper (Cognition 85 (2002) B21), Bornkessel, Schlesewsky, and Friederici report ERP data that they claim “show that online processing difficulties induced by word order variations in German cannot be attributed to the relative infrequency of the constructions in question, but rather appear to reflect the application of grammatical principles during parsing” (p. B21). In this commentary we demonstrate that the posited contrast between grammatical principles and construction (in)frequency as sources of parsing problems is artificial because it is based on factually incorrect assumptions about the grammar of German and on inaccurate corpus frequency data concerning the German constructions involved. -
Kempen, G. (2003). Language generation. In W. Frawley (
Ed. ), International encyclopedia of linguistics (pp. 362-364). New York: Oxford University Press. -
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2003). Word order scrambling as a consequence of incremental sentence production. In H. Härtl, & H. Tappe (
Eds. ), Mediating between concepts and grammar (pp. 141-164). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. -
Seuren, P. A. M., & Kempen, G. (
Eds. ). (2003). Verb constructions in German and Dutch. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Share this page